


The Future’s Looking Down

by RatKingDad



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, imagery of corpses and bugs so be careful kids, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:14:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25787173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RatKingDad/pseuds/RatKingDad
Summary: Hadestown from the perspective of Eurydice, and dying and dead girl.
Relationships: Eurydice/Orpheus (Hadestown)
Kudos: 9





	The Future’s Looking Down

I. Beginning

To freeze is an awful death. To starve is worse. Eurydice chose the former.

See, Eurydice had been starving her whole life, and knew that the feeling was pure desperation. It laid low in her gut and gradually learned to climb up into her lungs and throat and finally to her brain, infecting every thought with its razor sharp claws. Hunger dug at her from the inside, burrowing little holes into everything she was or could have been. Idly, it became her, became the word that would be used to describe her. Before she was smart or strong, Eurydice was hungry. She had never been full in her life that she could remember. It wasn’t just food she hungered for, it was love and shelter and for the itch in her legs that told her to run run run never look back to go away. The hollowness, familiar as it was, hurt like anything else.

For one summer, Eurydice did not starve. She let herself forget her most loyal companion, a torturous bedfellow that had enveloped her for so long. All for a boy who’s smile filled her from her toes to the tips of her hair like she had never been hungry in her life. His kiss was sweeter than any wine and his tongue was honeyed. So, forgive her for letting herself forget the world’s cruelty if only for a moment. But a moment was enough.

When the cold came again, the hunger came so much stronger than it ever had, almost as vengeance for her daring to think she could ever escape it. What was worse was that she no longer had her boy to keep her full, he left her for a song that could fix everything. He wanted to bring the world back to normal, but he had called her the world and she was breaking trying to keep a patience that she had never had. He told her that he would stay with her, but it felt like she was always chasing him. For once in her life, Eurydice planned to hunker down and hide rather than run and this boy was testing that. But she loved him. And so she bowed her head and bent her spine and travelled into a winter storm. 

That’s when the freezing set in, sharp and biting at every bit of exposed skin. The wind whispered softly in her ears, promising her that the frost was as soft as any bed could be. The world was blanketed with white, white like cotton that would be so easy to lay down in and sleep. She shook her head vigorously. Orpheus, she had to find Orpheus and bring him home before he froze. What she could not have known was that as Oprheus sang the snow melted around him, that he needed no jacket or fire or even food, his body just slightly more than human. Eurydice was painfully aware of her own needs, though. 

Lay down the wind whispered to her, pulling her rucksack into the trees, all of her food along with it.

He is not coming, it taunted, ripping her jacket from her shoulders, blasting her with the bitter chill.

It would be so much easier to give up now it goaded, running a finger over her cheek and sending a gust at her ankles, bringing her tumbling to the frozen dirt, harder than stone.

She didn’t want to get up. She was so, so tired and she couldn’t even feel the cold anymore. Or well, she couldn’t feel it for a moment. Then it came back full force. The irony was that freezing felt a lot like burning. As she lay prone in the snow, for minutes or hours, her fingers and toes going white to red to black, she couldn’t help but notice the way that frostbitten and charred flesh looked so much the same. And oh gods did it burn, her nerves dying with screams and cries that sent cold flames through her body. The feeling was awful. But she was full, full of flame and molten lead and red hot salt that flowed in her veins and stomach. So maybe this was better. Better than hunger at least. 

“Come with me little songbird,” growled the king of the underworld, “stop your fight. Coin over flower. Freezing over starving. I’m a man of business doll, and I’m giving you as good a deal as you’re going to get,”

She fought for just a moment, clutched at the somehow still living flower in her pocket, her fingers able to move again with the pure heat radiating off of the man in front of her. The heat of steam pockets in mines and furnaces filled with coal and forges and kilns. The unnatural heat of ripping into the Earth. The kind of heat that comes off of Gaia’s healing wounds. Eurydice ‘s heart belonged to Orpheus. But her gut was that of metal and work. And so she tore her heart out and took the drachma, her ticket. The next she looked, the man was gone and the flower had begun to brown at its tips. Once, Eurydice knew how to survive and was learning how to live. Now she was neither. She was dying, truly, and the last of her energy was spent on a single word. 

“Orpheus”

II. Middle

It takes less time than she would think to start to forget what it was to live. She thought the underworld would be warm. She thought the air would smell of smoke and sweat, thought that she would be able to hear echoes of work. She thought a lot of things, but she doesn’t think too much anymore. That’s the king's job. 

  
  


Instead, she feels nothing at her. She is dead, and her senses have abandoned her. The handle of a pickaxe callouses her palm and she doesn’t feel the way the skin splits open and heals harder than before. There is no blood, she can’t bleed anymore. She does not sweat because she can’t. It’s not hot. Or cold. It’s just here, wherever here is. 

It makes her wonder why the lady ever complained, the one who’s name she is no longer able to say because anyone who’s numb lips form around it finds themselves in the king’s office. The girl doesn’t remember if they come back, she only knows that they go in and the dogs bark louder the next morning. Her mind is too stuffed with coal to think about it. 

Her name goes first. Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth and can’t quite fit around the word. By the time she finds strength to move it, the motions she needs are long forgotten. She remembers that once it was called a melody, but music cannot be in Hadestown. The wall keeps out those who would waste their time on such things, protecting the workers from that which would stop their own steady beat of metal against rock and stone. 

The oldest things slip away; her parents, her childhood home, the alleys she spent her teen years huddling up in, her first kiss and the boy attached to it. It all slips away in the swinging of her pick. But one thing sticks, one face and one name that grows in her cold skin like moss. It worms its way through rotting flesh and lays it’s spawn in the wet and warm places of what was once a living girl. Orpheus. He coats her throat and sticks to her like dried blood and sweat. He is all she has left of before. 

Asphodel, she’s been told. That’s where she is. The place for those who are unremarkable or who choose to leave the land of the living. She remembers being relieved at first, a deep fear that belonged to a living girl had been that she would be in the Fields of Punishment instead. But those were kept deep deep in the mines and their screams as they turned to fossil and oil were easily drowned out with a call and response. 

The foremen, she finds out, the people who crack whips and watch over lines and rest in beds not made of metal and straw, are those who made it to Elysium. A worker who is not too far gone to speak, whose jaw has yet to rot off, explains that you can tell which time around they are based on the boredom on their face. Those who are first timers are still excited, still reveling in the reward of eternal power. The second time there is a hint of remorse, and the monotony slips in the thin lines of their lips. The third time they are blank and uninterested, drinking cold water and sprinkling it on the desperate workers for a laugh. And then they get to live in the real town, get to buy the cars and railroads and oil that Hades has the workers making. 

Being numb hurts. She misses feeling something, she misses the boy. And then he’s here. Her boy is right in front of her, and he takes her hand.

“Orpheus,” she cries out. He smiles sadly at her, long fingers callused only on their tips curl around her much stronger hands. His eyes, oh Zeus, his eyes are so deep and she thinks that maybe she could burrow herself into them and get lost. 

“Eurydice,” he replies, and it takes a moment for her to remember that that is in fact her name. The girl, Eurydice, clutches onto her lover so tightly, so afraid that he will pour from her fingers like sand, like ash. But her kisses her, and for a moment Eurydice is alive again. She hopes he will not notice how her body is stiff and freezing, a walking corpse. 

And then the King shows up, tall and dark and mighty. His voice booms and rumbles in her chest, as cold and harsh as his machines. She wonders how the Lady loves him. Every time the Lady (Not Persephone, King Hades has forbidden them from speaking her name) walks past her, Eurydice can smell her perfume, can feel her warmth, can taste the smoke and dirt in her mouth. Her senses return for a moment when the Lady now in black gives her a look of pity. She thinks maybe the Lady deserves pity too. After all, perfume can only cover up so much of the stench of alcohol. 

The King reminds her that she belongs to him. He brings up terms she’s never heard of, tells her and her love that the contract she signed was her selling her body and soul to him. But how should Eurydice have known that? She can’t read very, can hardly write at all besides her name. It was never something she needed to know. Well, until now and now it was too late. A rotting and sludge covered brain cannot absorb information like a living one can.

  
  


They fight so hard. But he turns around. He didn’t love her enough, didn’t trust her enough, says the voices on the wind. And because she does not have him anymore, she believes them because she has nothing else to believe.

III. End

His name is gone, hers too and the real name of the King and his Lady. She doesn’t know what she’s holding, but she swears she can see the bones of her hands, tendons and skin and muscles gone. 

She knows they must dig

And they must build

And they are safe with the king

  
  


She does not know the color of the sky. 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed my interpretation of Hadestown! I’ve been working on this for months, trying to build a lore of how the underworld works.


End file.
